Monday, July 14, 2014
We started our 2 week long summer vacation with a nice, long road trip to the small town of Three Rivers, California. This little town is just outside of the south entrance to Sequoia National Park. We arrived around 6:00pm after a 9 hour drive! We checked into our room at the Lazy J Ranch and relaxed for a bit.
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| All the rooms were in these cute little cabin-type buildings. |
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| Ryan petting the sheep on property |
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| Chris grilled us some burgers for dinner! |
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| Swim time! |
We settled in for the night and prepared for a busy day tomorrow!
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Tuesday, July 15, 2014
We entered the park through the south Ash Mountain Entrance. We stopped at the Visitor's Center and learned about the lower foothills area. This area is only about 1700ft and the terrain is very dry and desert. It reminded me alot of Sedona.
We stopped to check out this neat rock! The road used to run under this tunnel but now you can only walk through it.
(or climb on it if you are a little monkey!)
This is where we are headed:
We drove for about 30 minutes through back and forth switchbacks up the mountains and into:
The GIANT FOREST!
At 6000ft, the trees are just amazing! It feels like we are in an ancient time here.
We stopped at the Giant Forest Museum to get our first up close look at these massive Sequoia trees.
This group of 3 trees reminded me of my 3 boys!
After checking out the museum, we ate lunch in the area and then started out on our first like hike! We had planned to hike the Alta Trail across to the Huckleberry Trail to Crescent meadow.
But the Alta Trail was closed for controlled burns in the area.
So we consulted our map and decided to take a different route. We took Bear Hill trail. This was a very "hilly" trail and was pretty tiring now that we are at 6000ft!
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| This was a hollow tree- Ethan is standing inside and we could see down really far! |
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| Our little squirrel friend! |
Check out these MASSIVE pine cones! These are actually from Sugar Pine trees, not Sequoias. The Sequoia cones are actually very small.
It was so amazing to walk through these ancient forests!
Pictures just don't do justice!
As we approached Crescent Meadow, we saw a group of people standing and watching the meadow. The reported a mama bear with 2 cubs. We watched for a long time and observed this amazing site!
It was really cool to see bears up close and in the wild. They were just eating and playing- they would glance at us occasionally but really didn't seem to mind us being there. It was so amazing!
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| Crescent Meadow |
We had hiked about 3.5 miles at this point. We were pretty tired and so we took the shuttle from the Crescent Meadow back to our car near the Giant Forest Museum.
We drove the Moro Rock/Crescent Meadow Road to check out this cool site:
Then we stopped to climb Moro Rock!
And we were rewarded with this amazing view of the Sierra Nevadas! Just beautiful! Mt. Whitney (tallest peak in the lower 48 states) is nearby but we were not able to see it.
After that we drove to the Sherman Tree parking area to check out the largest tree in the world!
The General Sherman!
It was getting late, but we decided to go ahead and hike the Congress Trail to see some of the neatest trees in the park.
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| Beautiful little waterfall! |
The McKinley Tree- see the boys & Chris at the bottom!
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| The Room Tree |
The Senate
We were alone on the trails. Just our family hiking along. As we came along the trail we passed a meadow and I saw the grass waving- I made everyone stop and we saw another bear in the meadow!
We didn't stay too long because it was starting to get dark. We headed on to see The President, the 2nd largest tree in the world.
We passed by the meadow again and stopped to watch the bear and her cub for a little bit. We were about 20 yards from them!
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| You can see the cub a little on the left side of this picture. |
It was almost dark as we got back to the car. We passed this guy on the Congress Trail.
We headed up north in the dark for about 30 minutes to where we were staying at the John Muir Lodge. I had a skillet meal that we cooked up in the room and got into bed around 10:00pm. It was an exhausting but amazing day!
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